Journal Article

Adaptive Photon Mapping Based on Gradient

Chun-Meng Kang Lu Wang Yan-Ning Xu Xiang-Xu Meng Yuan- Jie Song

2016

Overview

Photon mapping can simulate some special effects efficiently such as shadows and caustics. Photon mapping runs in two phases： the photon map generating phase and the radiance estimation phase. In this paper, we focus on the bandwidth selection process in the second phase, as it can affect the final quality significantly. Poor results with noise arise if few photons are collected, while bias appears if a large number of photons are collected. In order to solve this issue, we propose an adaptive radiance estimation solution to obtain trade-offs between noise and bias by changing the number of neighboring photons and the shape of the collected area according to the radiance gradient. Our approach can be applied in both the direct and the indirect illumination computation. Finally, experimental results show that our approach can produce smoother quality while keeping the high frequency features perfectly compared with the original photon mapping algorithm.

• Publisher: Springer US,Springer Nature B.V,School of Computer Science and Technology, Shandong University, Jinan 252000, China Engineering Research Center of Digital Media Technology, Ministry of Education, Jinan 252000, China
• Subject: Algorithms / Analysis / Artificial Intelligence / Bandwidths / Bias / Computer graphics / Computer Science / Computer simulation / Data Structures and Information Theory / Information Systems Applications (incl.Internet) / Mapping / Mathematical models / Noise / Photons / R&D / Radiance / Regular Paper / Research & development / Software Engineering / Special effects / Studies / Theory of Computation / 光子产生 / 噪声产生 / 映射算法 / 梯度 / 特殊效果 / 相位估计 / 自适应 / 选择过程